The snotty quote was posted by Sarah Palin on (like all the great frontier women who've come before her) her Facebook page to respond to the criticism she knew and hoped would be coming after she hunted, killed and carved up a Caribou during a segment of her truly awful reality show, "Sarah Palin's Alaska", broadcast on The-Now-Hilariously-Titled Living Channel.

I eat meat, chicken and fish, have shoes and furniture made of leather, and PETA is not ever going to put me on the cover of their brochure and for these reasons Palin thinks it's hypocritical of me to find what she did heart-stoppingly disgusting. I don't think it is, and here's why.

Like 95% of the people I know, I don't have a visceral (look it up) problem eating meat or wearing a belt. But like absolutely everybody I know, I don't relish the idea of torturing animals. I don't enjoy the fact that they're dead and I certainly don't want to volunteer to be the one to kill them and if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-from-Hell, I wouldn't do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.

I'm able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don't watch snuff films and you make them. You weren't killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I've tried and tried and for the life of me, I can't make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I'm able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.

So I don't think I will save my condemnation, you phony pioneer girl. (I'm in film and television, Cruella, and there was an insert close-up of your manicure while you were roughing it in God's country. I know exactly how many feet off camera your hair and make-up trailer was.)

And you didn't just do it for fun and you didn't just do it for money. That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain. You knew there'd be a protest from PETA and you knew that would be an opportunity to hate on some people, you witless bully. What a uniter you'd be--bringing the right together with the far right.

(Let me be the first to say that I abused cocaine and was arrested for it in April 2001. I want to be the first to say it so that when Palin's Army of Arrogant crassholes, bereft of any reasonable rebuttal, write it all over the internet tomorrow they will at best be the second.)

I eat meat, there are leather chairs in my office, Sarah Palin is deranged and The Living Channel should be ashamed of itself.

Eh. I adore Sorkin and the West Wing, too, but I think he doesn't have a leg to stand on unless he's ever investigated how his meat gets to his plate. And hunting for political gain is a longstanding tradition. The argument that you're a better person because you shift the act of killing an animal onto someone who is likely poor and without other work options because it would just pain you too much to kill the animal yourself is very convoluted. How is that any better than killing an animal for notoriety?

Eh. I adore Sorkin and the West Wing, too, but I think he doesn't have a leg to stand on unless he's ever investigated how his meat gets to his plate. And hunting for political gain is a longstanding tradition. The argument that you're a better person because you shift the act of killing an animal onto someone who is likely poor and without other work options because it would just pain you too much to kill the animal yourself is very convoluted. How is that any better than killing an animal for notoriety?

I can't believe I'm defending Sarah Palin.

+1I see what he's saying, but having other people kill and torture animals for your leather chairs doesn't make you particularly high and mighty. You may not watch or make the snuff films, but you still fork the corpse.

Eh. I adore Sorkin and the West Wing, too, but I think he doesn't have a leg to stand on unless he's ever investigated how his meat gets to his plate. And hunting for political gain is a longstanding tradition. The argument that you're a better person because you shift the act of killing an animal onto someone who is likely poor and without other work options because it would just pain you too much to kill the animal yourself is very convoluted. How is that any better than killing an animal for notoriety?

I see what he's saying, but having other people kill and torture animals for your leather chairs doesn't make you particularly high and mighty. You may not watch or make the snuff films, but you still fork the corpse.

Exactly this. I find myself less and less interested in the perceived gradations between ways of eating/using animals (ie, the "hunting is more 'honest' than shopping at the Safeway" arguments). As far as I'm concerned, it's neither "better" nor "worse" to blow someone's head off for pleasure, or food, than it is to squeeze your eyes shut, click your heels together and pretend there's two types of "chicken": the cute, barnyard, picture-book kind, and the kind that comes wrapped in plastic/smothered in marinara sauce. It's still a chicken (or pig, or cow, or lamb, or fish), it's still dead, and no matter how it got that way, participation in its commodification contributes to the continued torture, exploitation, and unnecessary slaughter of billions just like it. If Mr. Sorkin feels so badly about animals being killed for his dinner, his chairs, and his shoes, he would strengthen his argument - and his credibility - by choosing to eat, sit on, and wear something else.

I eat meat, chicken and fish, have shoes and furniture made of leather, and PETA is not ever going to put me on the cover of their brochure and for these reasons Palin thinks it's hypocritical of me to find what she did heart-stoppingly disgusting. I don't think it is, and here's why.

Like 95% of the people I know, I don't have a visceral (look it up) problem eating meat or wearing a belt. But like absolutely everybody I know, I don't relish the idea of torturing animals. I don't enjoy the fact that they're dead and I certainly don't want to volunteer to be the one to kill them and if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-from-Hell, I wouldn't do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.

is this not the definition of hypocrisy? you don't like the idea of animals being tortured, and you don't want to get your hands dirty with it, but as long as you don't have to see it happening you're fine with filling your home and stomach with its end results?

_________________"rise from the ashes of douchebaggery like a fancy vegan phoenix" - amandabear"I'm pretty sure the moral of this story is: fork pants." - cq

While I loved reading the piece and I totally agree with his assessment of SP...I think he's right about Sarah but wrong about himself...

That is a good way to phrase it.

Yeah, that's pretty much the perfect way to phrase it.

But even though I don't agree with how he views himself, the audience to whome he's writing is, largely, not vegan and not likely to be aware of all the convolutions in his argument. And while I doubt any of his fans are Palin supporters, the reasons they don't support her may have nothing to do with her cruelty to animals--highlighting her joy of the act of killing itself could catalyze more thinking about how animals, politics, and hypocrisy are intertwined (I know, these are things most of us think about on a daily basis--but for the rest of the world, baby steps).

_________________"So often I wish Adam were a real boy." - interrobang?!"If he was you'd hear him farting at the back of your yoga class." - 8ball

At the risk of leaving myself open to massive flaming or ridicule (as well as having my girlfriend write me a lengthy email from work today detailing how I am wrong), my man-crush on Aaron Sorkin means I have to respond to the general sentiment of the respondents in this thread. :)

Depending on the studies and surveys that you look at, somewhere between 3.2% and 5.4% of Americans are vegetarians. Of these, somewhere between 5 and 15% are Vegan. These are not significantly large numbers. Thanks to the wonderful work of organisations like PETA, however, this minority has enjoyed quite a large and vocal public presence, and i'm sure we can all agree that any positive steps towards ending animal cruelty and unsustainable farming practices are worthy of recognition and support.

That said, an overwhelming majority of Americans still eat meat as a regular part of their diet. This is not something that we can simply stick our heads in the sand about and try and ignore. Furthermore, it is argued/asserted that much of this meat comes from factory-farms where animals live in abhorrent conditions.

Let me make it absolutely clear here that I am against factory-farming. My mere presence on this website should be a clear indicator of that. :)

However, if we are to take off our animal rights-activist hats momentarily, surely we can acknowledge that, as abhorrent and cruel as factory farming is, it at the very least is serving a purpose; those animals are being killed or exploited for food.

Hunting purely for sport, with no intention whatsoever to use the animals you kill to feed your family, is beyond cruelty. It is unadulterated torture, and by definition alone, is murder. Taking apparent pleasure in the killing of animals in their natural habitat is disgusting. What makes this whole Palin debacle even worse is that she has risen to prominence on this whole facade of being an outdoorsy woman of the wilderness. If you speak to any real hunter though, (even though i'm sure we'd all disagree with them) they talk of having nothing but respect for the animals - they always try for a one-shot-kill approach to spare the animal any undue pain. Palin took "5 or 6 shots" to kill the Caribou.

The harsh reality is that, in America at least (and certainly also in Australia), the foundation that society is built upon -that is farming, meat eating, etc- is not about to change overnight. Any small and positive steps towards the ceasation of needless animal cruelty is something that the "vegan community" should be embracing positively. However, too often someone writes or says something like Aaron Sorkin has here, saying that "hunting is bad" or "animal cruelty is bad", and instead of agreeing with him and then engaging in positive dialogue, using it as an opportunity to educate and introduce new perspectives to these people, they are labeled as "hypocrites" because they themselves aren't vegan, or they wear leather, etc.

Maybe it's just me, but I find these sort of responses do more harm than good to the mainstream reputations of the vegan/PETA demographics. It instantly alienates people, and makes them reluctant to be open to the ideas and principles behind veganism, et al.

Anyway, that's just my two cents. I'm sure that others here will be vastly more educated than I on these subjects, and will come in here and rip my response to shreds. I just had to put forward my thoughts on the topic :)

We're not talking to mainstream audiences. We're talking to vegans and people interested in vegan food. If there's one place we should be able to discuss issues frankly, it's amongst ourselves.

Palin is eating what she killed, presumably replacing some factory farmed meat. So while it may be sport as well, I don't think it takes it out of the category of food.

And I think it's pointless to compare the suffering of an animal that grew up in the wild and was then shot five times with an animal who grew up in the factory farming system and was killed in a slaughterhouse. There's no way to measure degree of suffering.

i'll engage in a gentler dialogue about something like this outside of the ppk, but no matter where the conversation is taking place, i'm not going to ignore hypocrisy when i see it just because it's shared by the majority. and i'd argue that an animal raised on a factory farm suffers more over the course of its lifetime than an animal that lives in the wild. i'd also argue that raising animals for food and hunting them for sport are equally unnecessary, because, as everyone here can attest, people don't need to eat meat. i think these are the principles behind veganism. but that's just my argumentative two cents.

_________________"rise from the ashes of douchebaggery like a fancy vegan phoenix" - amandabear"I'm pretty sure the moral of this story is: fork pants." - cq

That said, an overwhelming majority of Americans still eat meat as a regular part of their diet. This is not something that we can simply stick our heads in the sand about and try and ignore. Furthermore, it is argued/asserted that much of this meat comes from factory-farms where animals live in abhorrent conditions.

Agreed. I don't understand who you think is sticking their heads in the sand on this one.

Chadwiko wrote:

Let me make it absolutely clear here that I am against factory-farming. My mere presence on this website should be a clear indicator of that. :)

However, if we are to take off our animal rights-activist hats momentarily, surely we can acknowledge that, as abhorrent and cruel as factory farming is, it at the very least is serving a purpose; those animals are being killed or exploited for food.

Hunting purely for sport, with no intention whatsoever to use the animals you kill to feed your family, is beyond cruelty. It is unadulterated torture, and by definition alone, is murder.

As someone said, factory farms are much more torturous than an animal that lives out its life and is ultimately shot. Plus, these hunters do claim to feed their families hunted meat.

Chadwiko wrote:

Taking apparent pleasure in the killing of animals in their natural habitat is disgusting. What makes this whole Palin debacle even worse is that she has risen to prominence on this whole facade of being an outdoorsy woman of the wilderness. If you speak to any real hunter though, (even though i'm sure we'd all disagree with them) they talk of having nothing but respect for the animals - they always try for a one-shot-kill approach to spare the animal any undue pain. Palin took "5 or 6 shots" to kill the Caribou.

But Sorkin is taking pleasure in the killing of animals, too. For his chair and his food and whatever else. Of course I think Aaron Sorkin is probably a more compassionate person than Sarah Palin, I agree that it's creepy and evil how she seems to relish killing animals. But that doesn't clear Sorkin. And yes hunters think Sarah Palin was a shitty hunter, but again, that doesn't make Aaron Sorkin's dinner any more ethical.

Chadwiko wrote:

The harsh reality is that, in America at least (and certainly also in Australia), the foundation that society is built upon -that is farming, meat eating, etc- is not about to change overnight. Any small and positive steps towards the ceasation of needless animal cruelty is something that the "vegan community" should be embracing positively. However, too often someone writes or says something like Aaron Sorkin has here, saying that "hunting is bad" or "animal cruelty is bad", and instead of agreeing with him and then engaging in positive dialogue, using it as an opportunity to educate and introduce new perspectives to these people, they are labeled as "hypocrites" because they themselves aren't vegan, or they wear leather, etc.

But Aaron Sorkin was justifying meat eating and wearing leather, he wasn't speaking out against any thing other than Sarah Palin. And I think it is a complete untruth that vegans don't engage in positive dialogue when presented with the opportunity to do so. But pointing out that someone (a celebrity, who none of us know persoanally) is being hypocritical is okay to do when it is an obvious as the nose on my face. His essay was congratulating himself, I don't see how that is siding in anyway with any sort of animal care principles. If you were going to strip down his message it would be "Stop hunting! Eat factory farmed meat!" Taking that message to its conclusion is kind of horrifying. So yeah, if I meet him, I would talk to him in a nice way about why I think his ideology is wrong. But as it stands, I have no way to communicate with him. Hopefully a promininent celebrity vegan will get the chance.

Chadwiko wrote:

Maybe it's just me, but I find these sort of responses do more harm than good to the mainstream reputations of the vegan/PETA demographics. It instantly alienates people, and makes them reluctant to be open to the ideas and principles behind veganism, et al.

I don't align myself with PETA at all, and most vegans I know don't, either. So I'll just speak to the vegan demographic. We do plenty of positive outreach. Bake sales, farm sanctuaries, vegan social gatherings, cat rescue work, vegan restaurants...there are SO MANY positive vegan messages out there. If someone read this thread and thought "I don't want to be vegan now because they think...Alan Sorkin...shouldn't have leather chairs...." then I dunno, would they ever have wanted to be vegan in the first place? I think most people get that we don't support leather or meat. Even the most ignorant of people probably know that vegetarians don't eat meat?

Chadwiko wrote:

Anyway, that's just my two cents. I'm sure that others here will be vastly more educated than I on these subjects, and will come in here and rip my response to shreds. I just had to put forward my thoughts on the topic :)

I don't want to rip your argument to shreds, I just want to let you know that I think it's okay to cry foul when we see it. And I think that Aaron Sorkin, should he be lurking, might even agree!

I agree with Sorkin and many of you that the way in which Palin hunted this animal was deeply disturbing, and that hunting for sport is more wasteful and cruel than hunting for food. But, as I said in the comments on his article, his condemnation is highly complicated at best. Most of the comments to the above two posts talk about missing Sorkin's political point, but I think you can fully comprehend that point and still point out the inconsistencies in Sorkin's and others' personal philosophies. As I'm sure everyone here agrees, Sorkin's article really brings to light the incredible disconnect so many people share between the animal on their plate and the animal in the field.

And if anyone here could bare to watch the appalling footage documented in Earthlings, you know that some workers in factory farms also seem to revel in the unnecessary and overwhelmingly cruel death of factory farmed animals.

And I think it's pointless to compare the suffering of an animal that grew up in the wild and was then shot five times with an animal who grew up in the factory farming system and was killed in a slaughterhouse. There's no way to measure degree of suffering.

I'd comfortably assume that an animal who gets to walk around and live in the wild for a while and then get shot by a hunter has a way better life on average than an animal who's born and raised in a factory farm.

And I think it's pointless to compare the suffering of an animal that grew up in the wild and was then shot five times with an animal who grew up in the factory farming system and was killed in a slaughterhouse. There's no way to measure degree of suffering.

I'd comfortably assume that an animal who gets to walk around and live in the wild for a while and then get shot by a hunter has a way better life on average than an animal who's born and raised in a factory farm.

They both forking suck. I don't think a who suffers more contest is very helpful unless you're playing that game where you have to decide whether you want to die of fire or freezing to death (freezing!).

And I think it's pointless to compare the suffering of an animal that grew up in the wild and was then shot five times with an animal who grew up in the factory farming system and was killed in a slaughterhouse. There's no way to measure degree of suffering.

I'd comfortably assume that an animal who gets to walk around and live in the wild for a while and then get shot by a hunter has a way better life on average than an animal who's born and raised in a factory farm.

They both forking suck. I don't think a who suffers more contest is very helpful unless you're playing that game where you have to decide whether you want to die of fire or freezing to death (freezing!).

And I think it's pointless to compare the suffering of an animal that grew up in the wild and was then shot five times with an animal who grew up in the factory farming system and was killed in a slaughterhouse. There's no way to measure degree of suffering.

I'd comfortably assume that an animal who gets to walk around and live in the wild for a while and then get shot by a hunter has a way better life on average than an animal who's born and raised in a factory farm.

that's my belief, now I'm not going to get my gun and shoot an animal and I don't support either one. But a few friends that eat meat have pointed out the horror of this hunting season and I brought that up. I thought Palin said this was some sort of sustainability for her family. I had a farm in my family that was self-sustaining but they didn't fly hours from their home to hunt and their nearest grocery store was a few hours away. We didn't hear from them for most of the winter because they were snowed in eating their canned produce and jerky or meat from their deep-freezer, they spent the warm days preparing for all of that.